Emotion and Reason. Part 3

So back to my original intention behind this post that I have now divided up into three parts.

I am challenging the notion that reason is the crowning authority of human existence and consciousness. And, as a commenter on Part 2 pointed out: I do agree with the observation that what we often think is rational or reasonable is often hardly that.

But I would even counter this observation by saying that such an observation is based in an assumption of reason: it is by reason it’s self that we are able to make such distinctions.

I suggest keeping in mind the idea of the Two Routes, which is an extrapolation of the non-philosophical premise of unilateral duality: by pointing something out and describing it I am not therefore suggesting that something is wrong with it nor making an argument that I have a better idea: I am simply describing a fact. If I say the tree is green and it has bark, I am not suggesting that I have a better way that the tree should be. Of course we can fall down the rabbit hole of what I call conventional philosophical speculation and consider all the probability and possibility of subjective experience of that tree. We can talk about how these subjective reality is may be true and that how our world is constituent of a plurality of subjective worlds. I am not making any argument about whether or not phenomenal subjective worlds are true or false; The veracity of any subjective opinion is absolutely up for debate.

What becomes evident by the contradiction that arises between these two types of understanding, though, is called a unilateral duality. This is to say that we take each of those two situations as situations that indeed are true, but then also note that the activity of the attempt to reconcile those two situations into a further reconciled state only speaks of the One Route. Hence what I am proposing as The Two Routes. Readers can look back at some of my posts to try and wrap ones head around this more fully, one can read Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophical books, and one can investigate what other people have to say about non-philosophy, if really need to comprehend all those details to be able to move over into the issue of an orientation upon objects. It’s OK. No shame there.

Nonetheless; The example that I’m working with here is the strange paradox that (1) reason can somehow analyze it self to say that this situation over here is not reasonable or not rational, and then this situation over there we’re going to categorize another various sort of system, and then this over yonder is what we call actual reason in comparison to these two or three or more possibilities, and then the whole thing amounts to an argument that we can negotiate over about what reason is, and (2) That reason as an object in-itself is characterized by point (1). This is an example of a unilateral duality, and it characterizes a particular manner or approach by which we can begin to understand what the human being is doing.

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This approach is not dissimilar to the way that counseling might approach someone with, say, anxiety or depression or some sort of neurosis, to use an older term, or some pervading issue that a client may come in for psychological help.

I believe a particular theory that I am nodding toward right here is called Internal Family Systems (IFS). But there are a few theoretical approaches that incorporate a similar manner.

I think the idea is not very new: A client comes in complaining of an inability to stop Behaving in a certain manner, say for example, avoiding parties or social situations because of accute social anxiety, say. Keep in mind that I am not a practicing counselor but I’m just beginning to learn.

In any case, a possible approach to this situation is to get the client to externalize the problem. In other words, what the client is having trouble with is this whole thing that she calls her self which manifests in general as a thinking subject that is her self. The point of the intervention is to help the client see or look at the presenting issue as though it is not part of a whole system that is “her Self”, to help her to To gain sufficient distance from the issue in order to view the issue and address the issue as though it is affecting her self rather than being constituent of her singular whole person.

The issue here is not a speculation or a negotiation about whether or not there is this whole subject called the client herself. We treat the client as though she is an interrelation of various effectual aspects as the primary methodological material, as opposed to a “whole” person who is screwed up in various ways.

In reference to what I’m talking about so far as reason, or as I tend to call “philosophy” sometimes, by suggesting that the client may be affected by a problem rather than being the problem itself, I am thereby not suggesting that the problem may indeed not have to do with a whole system. Rather, I am suggesting that we can approach the whole system by viewing the system in a different manner yet while the system is still functioning and operating as a whole system, which is to say, excluding nothing.

So I will repeat; to point out the fact that reason itself is implied in the activity of indicating things that are not reasonable or indeed irrational as opposed to reasonable or rational, does not negate the fact that indeed reason is allowing for this division of itself. Developing different terms in order to compensate for this apparent paradox gets us nowhere significant into understanding what the human being actually does as it is, except that it gives us insight in that this is indeed what the human being consciousness does: A fact of the object that is the human being. Developing new terms in this way maintains and reifies the one route. Reason is not negated by describing what reason does, neither does such an honest description suggest that there is another way that reason might be operating. The conventional philosophical route Is thus characterized by a method wherein a fact can only be argued with by denying the fact itself. Hence, I say the conventional philosophical method is based in denial. Yet I am not suggesting that there is a better way, or that philosophy/reason should do or be something different. I am merely stating a fact about conventional philosophy.

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I believe by this line of reasoning I have come up with a second fact of the phenomenal subject. I think I came up with a first fact a year or two or so and you would have to look in my past posts for it. I think the first fact is that a phenomenal subject is bounded by nothing. But I could be wrong. Lol. Actually, with these two facts in place we could thereby come up with a third fact of the phenomenal subject that we have been calling “correlationalism”. Science is based on an honest acceptance of the facts, even while the facts might be tested.

OK. Well it looks like I’ve gotten done with part three and I still haven’t gotten to the original intention behind the whole post so it looks like there’s going to be a part 4

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